Free Loaders: Launching Devil Daggers Into Space

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There was a GameBoy jam this week and everything has gone slightly green. Sprites have taken over the free games mines and are playing non-stop chiptune down there. I can barely show my face in all my regular cyberspots because I’m just not pixellated enough. It was difficult to get you a haul of free games this week, is what I’m saying. So you’d better appreciate this bag of goodies.

Here’s the first one – a hot mess of planet-jumping, bomb-throwing arcade action. It’s a passionate mash-up of Devil Daggers and Mario Galaxy. Don’t say I’m not at the top of my curation game, because I am the undisputed king. Look upon my warez, ye mighty, and despair.

It’s an age-old question, perhaps as old as the stars themselves: what if Devil Daggers was set in space and you had to jump from one planet to another and also had to throw bombs at the baddies? Finally, some philosophical soul has provided an answer. YISAEWYD takes the clamouring horde of bad dudes from the fast-paced Devil Daggers and sets them on you among a cluster of planetoids.

You can leap from globe to globe, escaping the cycloptic orbs and searching for boxes to grab and throw with your gravity hand. Some of the boxes are bombs and will kill lots of eye-orbs in a single blow. At other times you may find yourself pursued and boxless. That’s okay! Just grab one of the baddies and throw him instead. Get a highscore and be the best. Don’t let anybody stand in your way. They all want you dead but you will not die. You are strong. You will achieve total victory. You will become the master of gravity.

Five chapters of interactively fictional horror. Hooray! You wake up in a dark cave, in a massive dirty puddle, unable to see anything in the gloom and with a possibly-bleeding bump on your head. Then you hear some sobbing. It’s a friend. Lucia is stuck in this cave too and together you need to find your way out. Weakly limp your way through a darkly branched story of fearing the unknown, scurrying through bat-filled chambers and tunnels with horrible treasures at the end of them. Carry on thoroughly creeping yourself out until you reach one of the tale’s four endings. I died! Which one will you get?

Super-minimalist samurai sword fight. Made for the fifth GameBoy Jam, this monochromatic dueling game sees you take up the sword against 6 computer enemies or a katana-wielding friendo. The moveset is intentionally limited – no jumping, no crouching, no throwing your sword. Just two types of slash, a backwards dodge and a forwards dash. It’s like the anti-Nidhogg. But defeating the enemies is still as hard as tempered steel. The first baddie is easy. The second a little tougher. The third is a whirlwind of slashes and dashes. The fourth? I have not seen the fourth.

Silent protagonist goes AWOL in land of decent zombies. Lurch into the JRPGFPS genre with your cigarette-clasping hand and pick up that phone. It’s Motherland and Fatherland. They want you to go shooting and killing. Get into town, get that pipe, enjoy the gun dog, listen to the guitarist, consider the corpses. Soldier up buddy, it’s time to go into the forest. Murder time, revolver time, hear the bullets fly. Reload, reload, better reload. Uh-oh, it looks like you’re in trouble because all of those things you just did were wrong and you are bad. Oops! Time to hash all this out like a good game. Work on your voice, choose those dialogues. No! Do it better! You are terrible at videogames.

Battle Farmer, Agrimancer, Cropgoblin – the three famous classes of farming hero. All of them are available to you in this compulsive Harvest Moon style farming action adventure. Can you tell what game jam this was made for? That’s right, it’s another GameBoy homage. Itch.io is coming down with them, it’s almost plague-like. Here you have to plant candy corn using corn seeds, water and grow potions to make yet more candy. Do not rest until the crops are harvested and you are the champion of farming. There are new areas to unlock and small secrets to be found. Make your way through a maze to find more potions and defeat the pumpkin zombos to get some cursed bones. It all makes sense. Don’t question it. You are a farmer, not a philosopher.

Teeny tiny windowed GameBoy game about boucing off the walls. Bounce left, bounce right, move on up, BAM. You are exploded and dead because you hit the thing. You understand now? Good. Press ‘R’ to go again.

2 Comments

Shinkendo was a rad time, even just playing single-player. Figuring out how the timing of the three moves available all fit together took me going through all five opponents to figure out halfway decently. The perfect length for its idea.